The leachate treatment landscape is changing. New technologies and new regulations have generated a lot of new questions. Here we answer a few common ones about leachate treatment and management.

Use the links below to jump to the section you need.

• Leachate 101
• Leachate regulations
• The Atmos Leachate Treatment System

Leachate 101

What is leachate?

As rainwater seeps through landfill waste, it leaches contaminants out of the trash, often turning into a thick, nasty sludge — leachate. The EPA requires landfills to collect, treat and safely dispose of it.

While the types and concentrations of leachate contaminants will vary from location to location, there are a few that show up in most landfills: organic carbons, dissolved and suspended solids, oil and grease, ammonia and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFOS/PFAS/PFOA).

What are PFOS/PFAS/PFOA?

Perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (more commonly known as PFOS/PFAS/PFOA) are chemicals that don’t break down over time. This is why they’re also called forever chemicals. These compounds come into landfills on products like clothes, packaging and frying pans, but also from sources like pesticides and contaminated daily cover dirt.

One of today’s biggest challenges facing the landfill industry is managing PFAS.

Because these chemicals don’t break down, they build up over time. Research has shown that exposure to higher concentrations may cause harm to human and animals, including low birth weight, fertility issues, increased risk of certain cancers and more.

Read more about PFAS here.

What leachate management options exist?

There are a number of ways you can manage your leachate, each with its own pros and cons. Some common ones include:

• Publicly owned treatment works (POTWs)
• Evaporation ponds
• Reverse osmosis
• On-site wastewater treatment plants
• Bioreactors or anaerobic digestors

To learn more about when it makes sense to use each of these solutions — and why you might need an alternative method — read this article.

Leachate regulations

What leachate regulations do landfills have to comply with?

There are a number of federal regulations that impact how landfills manage leachate, including Subtitle D of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) and the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES), as well as countless state and local ones.

What you plan to do with your leachate effluent dictates the regulations you need to follow. For direct discharge, you’ll need an NPDES permit. But for non-direct discharge, such as on-site application, you’ll likely need a permit from your state’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ).

Understanding the process and securing the correct permits falls under a landfill’s responsibility. However, our team regularly supplies engineer and system design drawings, as well as documentation of power requirements and other data to the appropriate groups. We’re here to support you during this process.

How much PFAS can be in leachate?

The EPA has not yet regulated how much PFAS can be in leachate. However, the EPA has released new limits for how much can be in drinking water. The National Primary Drinking Water Regulation will be phased in over the next 3 years, and on average, limits most varieties of PFAS to 4-10 ppt.

This likely means that the EPA plans to release leachate-specific regulations at POTWs within the next few years, with other leachate restrictions soon after.

But while this new regulation doesn’t impact landfills directly, it does impact landfills indirectly. As publicly owned treatment works (POTWs) comply with the new drinking water standards, they will likely be stricter about the amounts of PFAS they’re willing to accept in leachate. This could cause some POTWs to hike up their prices or stop accepting leachate altogether.

Fortunately, the Atmos Leachate Treatment System (ALTS) can reduce the most common types of PFAS to very low or non-detect levels, which is in line with the new drinking water standards. Read more about how the ALTS handles PFAS and other common contaminants here.

When will the EPA regulate the amount of PFAS in leachate?

The EPA’s PFAS regulations don’t apply to landfills and leachate yet. We suspect they may introduce limits for the acceptable amount of PFAS in leachate effluent sometime in 2025 with a multi-year transition period.

Though we don’t know what those PFAS limits will be, we can speculate they won’t be as strict as the drinking water levels, which range between 4 and 10 ppt.

How does the Atmos Leachate Treatment System keep up with evolving regulations?

The EPA isn’t the only governing body with evolving regulations. Often, contaminant level limits vary state by state, even county by county — what’s acceptable in Oklahoma may not be acceptable in California, and vice versa. And just because the EPA hasn’t released federal PFAS regulations doesn’t mean states won’t enact their own limits. The same rings true for other contaminants.

The Atmos Leachate Treatment System is modular, making it highly customizable and more than capable of keeping up with changing standards. For example, when the EPA enacts leachate effluent limits, a landfill may need an additional reverse osmosis unit to comply with stricter regulations. We can accommodate that. Or a municipality could decide to put higher limits on their TOC counts. To meet compliance, we could add another nano filtration module.

Read this case study for an example of how the ALTS can be customized to meet your goals.

The Atmos Leachate Treatment System

What is the Atmos Leachate Treatment System (ALTS)?

The Atmos Leachate Treatment System, or the ALTS, is a new way for landfills to manage their leachate. The system filters contaminants out to leave you with clean water for reuse or disposal.

Visit the leachate management page to dive deeper.

How does it work?

The Atmos Leachate Treatment System combines modules of three separate technologies: ultra filtration, nano filtration and reverse osmosis (RO).

Ultra filtration removes most of the larger contaminants, like total dissolved solids (TDS) and total suspended solids (TSS), so they don’t clog the finer membranes of the nano filtration and RO systems. Together, this combination works more effectively than any of these technologies on their own.

Thanks to the system’s modular design, we can customize it to your needs. For example, the ALTS typically treats between 20,000 and 70,000 gallons of leachate per day. If you need to increase the capacity, or don’t produce that much leachate, we can add or subtract modules as necessary. Or if your landfill struggles with solids, we can add a second ultra filtration module to handle that load more efficiently.

Does the ALTS eliminate leachate?

No, the Atmos Leachate Treatment System does not eliminate or erase leachate. Instead, it cleans and treats your leachate by filtering the contaminants out. This will leave you with both a waste stream and a clean water stream.

Learn more about the contaminants the ALTS targets here.

What do typical results look like?

The results will vary depending on how contaminated your leachate is to begin with and how clean you need it to be after treatment.

However, this example data can give you an idea of what typical results look like. The first chart shows the before and after data of a desert landfill with a high contaminant load, while the second shows a Gulf Coast area landfill with a more moderate contaminant load.

What can I do with the clean water?

Depending on your permits and how clean you need your water to be, there are a number of things you can do with it. For example, you could direct dispose it, like this Gulf Coat landfill, or you could use it in an on-site application, like for dust control, washing trucks or as part of your Atmos Daily Cover system.

Whatever you want to do with the water, we’ll design the system to help you meet those goals.

What’s my responsibility and what’s Atmos’ responsibility?

To get the Atmos Leachate Treatment System up and running, we need two things from you: power and a site that measures 60 feet by 60 feet to house the system and its skids. That’s it. We handle the rest — startup, initial testing, maintenance, operations, filter replacements, adjustments to stay in compliance, all of it. You won’t have to hire anyone to run the ALTS.

How do I pay for the ALTS?

The Atmos Leachate Treatment System operates on a pay-as-you-go model. So, much like our other equipment, there is no capital expense to install and run the ALTS at your landfill.

You’ll only pay for each gallon that we successfully treat.

How does installation work?

Once we gather raw leachate samples, determine your goals and design the system, it takes about 10 weeks to build your Atmos Leachate Treatment System.

From there, we load it onto two flatbed trucks for delivery — one for the 40-foot container with the bulk of your system and one for the skids. When we arrive, you point us to the right spot, and we’ll unload.

After that, you can expect our team to be on site for another 2 – 4 weeks while we connect the power, get the hoses set up, pressure test the ALTS with clean water to check for leaks, then test it with your leachate. We won’t leave until we’ve proven the system works.

Still have questions? Get in touch with our team.

If you didn’t find the answers you were looking for, talk to one of our experts.

For years, it didn’t much matter what was in your leachate. You could ship it to a publicly owned treatment works (POTW) and call it managed, regardless of the contaminants it contained.

Nowadays, that’s not a feasible way of doing business. POTWs are beholden to standards on certain contaminants and are expecting further regulations on others. Because of this, they’ve driven up treatment costs for leachate with high contaminant loads — if they accept it at all.

Ultimately, cost-effective and risk-averse leachate management requires more nuanced methods than ever before. As a starting point, it requires understanding of the contaminants making leachate more difficult to manage.

Let’s look at 8 types of contaminants that landfills care most about, as well as real-life data showing how Atmos’ alternative to traditional leachate treatment methods can remove them from your leachate.

A high-level look at the data

Below, you’ll see two tables. They display performance data of the Atmos Leachate Treatment System (ALTS) at two different landfills. Pay attention first to the contaminants measured. You’ll see that the two landfills had some different concerns.

Then you’ll see that the contaminant loads at the different landfills are significantly different. One is a highly contaminated site in the desert. The other a Gulf Coast landfill whose biggest challenge was humidity preventing evaporation.

Their ponds were filling up and their POTWs were becoming less and less viable treatment partners.

The data shows successful treatment of all contaminants, which requires a treatment system that utilizes multiple methods. Let’s dig into the contaminants themselves and their preferred treatment methods.

1. Total organic carbon (TOC)

TOC measures the concentration of carbon present in organic compounds within the leachate.

The most common TOC removal method is via adsorption filters. While the results may vary depending on the contaminant load, we can typically remove at least 99.5% of TOC from leachate with the nanofiltration module.

2. Total dissolved solids (TDS)

TDS measures the combined concentration of inorganic and organic substances dissolved in the leachate. Leachate high in TDS can gunk up treatment systems that aren’t designed to filter it out and cause maintenance problems — especially in reverse osmosis (RO) systems.

The first module in the ALTS is an ultrafiltration (UF) system, designed to filter out the solids first, so they don’t cause problems in the other downstream modules. The nanofiltration and reverse osmosis modules clean up what’s left. It historically removes more than 95% of TDS from leachate.

3. Total suspended solids (TSS)

TSS measures the concentration of solid particles suspended in leachate. Like TDS, they’ll cause maintenance trouble if not handled properly, so we treat them with a UF module.

Unlike TDS, the EPA has outlined an explicit secondary treatment standard for acceptable levels of TSS in effluent water. Treated effluent should have a 30-day average TSS content at or below 30mg/L, and treatment practices should remove at least 85% of TSS by concentration.

(Entirely biological treatment processes are granted a larger acceptable TSS concentration in effluent water).

The ALTS targets TSS with its UF module and typically achieves greater than 99% TSS removal.

4. Oil and grease

This measure is more self-explanatory and covers multiple hydrocarbons like fats, oils and related substances. Oil-water separators aid hydrocarbon filtering traditionally.

The ALTS handles oil and grease by separating via mechanical screen, as well as through UF.

5. pH

pH measures the acidity or alkalinity of your leachate. EPA standards require effluent water within a range of 6.0 – 9.0.

While the nanofiltration stage can add hardness to pH, it’s usually managed by introducing a base or acid before full treatment.

6. Biochemical oxygen demand (BOD)

BOD measures the concentration of oxygen-demanding organic pollutants in your leachate. Acceptable and unacceptable levels are determined by modeling and set by the EPA. Secondary treatment standards set acceptable concentrations at a 30-day average of 30mg/L or less. But some states have different regulations.

Whether you need to hit the federal regulations or a stricter state limit, we can customize your system to reach your BOD goals.

7. Chemical oxygen demand (COD)

COD measures the concentration of oxygen-demanding organic and inorganic pollutants in your leachate. It indicates the oxygen demand placed on the natural environment where effluent water is distributed — higher levels are more likely to be harmful to aquatic life. Unlike BOD, the EPA hasn’t set a COD standard, but many states have.

Within the ALTS, the RO module filters the COD out of the leachate.

8. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFOS/PFAS/PFOA)

PFOS/PFAS/PFOA measure the presence of a suite of industrial “forever” chemicals in your leachate. They are becoming a hot topic in wastewater conversations. While the EPA recently placed limits on the acceptable amount of these chemicals in drinking water, it has not yet enacted regulations for effluent water, although some states may soon regulate PFAS in leachate.

The ALTS relies on its RO modules, as well as a final pass across activated carbon beds, to achieve removal of PFOS/PFAS/PFOA.

Want to talk about the specific contaminants you’re dealing with?

We know as well as anyone that every landfill is different. If you’re running out of space for leachate ponds or emptying your pockets for offsite leachate treatment to stay within your permits, get in touch.

We can start outlining your pay-as-you-go leachate treatment system, to save you money and put some distance between your contaminant levels and your permit limits.

Along the hot and sticky Gulf Coast, there’s a landfill. Every year, it accepts roughly 700,000 tons of waste onto its 60-acre facility.

For landfills in wet climates like the Southeast, where big storms roll through often, and humidity hangs heavy in the air, leachate management presents a serious challenge. And this landfill is no different.

It’s even more challenging when your leachate pond is getting full.

The subsidiary that owns and operates this landfill sent John, a corporate engineer and sustainability manager who asked to remain anonymous, down to access the situation. John’s goal? Find a leachate management solution before this situation truly became a problem.

He turned to our team at Atmos Technologies.

Here’s how our team helped him find an alternative way to cost-effectively manage this landfill’s leachate.

A leachate pond on the verge of overflow

Depending on rainfall amounts, the landfill generates between 15 and 20 million gallons of leachate per year, which is standard for the region. Before working with Atmos, most of that leachate went into a large pond.

“You can fill up the pond, but you can only fill it up once,” John said. “And you get some evaporation, but obviously it’s very humid here, so you don’t get a ton.”

And when evaporation does occur, it increases the concentration of solids in the pond. Over time, as these solids build up, they make evaporation less and less effective as a leachate management strategy.

“From a water treatment standpoint, solids really mess you up,” he said. “You basically have to get rid of those before you can do any kind of other treatment. Otherwise, they hamper any efforts to do anything else. Any kind of filter, carbon or filtration media immediately gets blinded off.”

Fortunately, the landfill’s concentration of solids hadn’t approached any regulatory thresholds. But unfortunately, the pond was too close to capacity for comfort.

Staring down an expensive Plan B

While the landfill discharged most of the leachate to the pond, they still sent some of it to their local publicly owned treatment works (POTW). Just one or two loads a week — enough to keep the relationship open if and when the situation with the leachate pond became dire.

“One or two loads isn’t that big of a deal, but if all of your leachate has to go to a POTW … a swing like that could hurt,” John said. “Our pond was to the point where we couldn’t direct discharge and that’s kind of the problem. We got a POTW lined up and started moving that direction, but obviously we didn’t want to bite that bullet if we don’t have to.”

A bullet that could have cost them millions of dollars per year, with no guarantee of how long the POTW would accept their leachate. Then they’d be right back at square one.

“But we could not allow the pond to overflow.”

Looking for something new, and finding it

Late last year, John and the landfill started evaluating their options.

Reverse osmosis wouldn’t solve the solids issue. An evaporator was too similar to what they were already doing. And the landfill wasn’t large enough for a biological system. He needed something else.

Something like the new Atmos Leachate Treatment System (ALTS) — a system that filters the contaminants out of leachate, leaving clean water for reuse or disposal. The modular design also makes it highly customizable, meaning the landfill could double down on the stage that manages solids.

And it made sense on the PnL. There’d be no capital expense with the ALTS (the landfill would only pay for each gallon of leachate that we successfully treated), and no need to hire any additional employees to operate and maintain the system.

“It was smooth sailing. Atmos just handled it.”

From the first visit to collect raw leachate samples to the day ALTS turned on, the whole installation process took about 12 weeks. This included:
• Determining the best place to put the 60-foot by 60-foot system
• Assessing plumbing demands
• Deciding to direct discharge the effluents

The whole process felt easy and straightforward for John.

Now, with the system up and running, the landfill is already seeing results. Before filtering their leachate through the ALTS, it had 10,000 mg/L of TOC. Now, after treatment, that number dropped to 32 mg/L — low enough they could direct discharge the clean water.

“There’s no noxious stuff, obviously no odors, no constituents below levels that are below what you would consider wastewater,” according to the sustainability manager. “It’s obviously not drinking water standard, but it’s a significant improvement from what it is coming out of the hill.”

“[The Atmos team] is good,” John said. “They know their process and they know water treatment. So, when you encounter something, they generally have ideas on how to fix it.”

So far, there hasn’t been much to fix. And the landfill no longer worries about leachate pond capacity.

You can take control of your leachate management

Moving forward, the landfill plans on slowly phasing out those weekly trips to the POTW, just as John hopes to implement the ALTS at the subsidiary’s other landfills.

“What Atmos is really doing is they’re optimizing our leachate treatment and disposal to meet real-world logistical issues,” he said.

To learn how the Atmos Leachate Treatment System can help your landfill, too, get in touch with our team.

It’s a nightmare come true for many landfills: The closest publicly owned treatment works (POTW) stops accepting your leachate.

Maybe it’s too contaminated.

Maybe they can take some, but not all of it.

Or maybe they simply jacked the price up too high to be economically feasible.

Regardless, when this happens to you, you’ll have two options. You could bite the bullet and rack up even more transportation costs by trucking your leachate to another POTW that may or may not take it. Or you could find a new way to manage your leachate.

And POTW regulations concerning discharge cleanliness standards, the amount of leachate POTWs are allowed to take and the concentration of contaminants in that waste continue to tighten, you likely will need to find a new way to manage your leachate.

The Atmos Leachate Treatment System (ALTS) is the alternative way of cleaning your leachate. It filters out contaminants by combining three technologies (ultra filtration, nano filtration and reverse osmosis), leaving you with clean water you can dispose of or reuse in your operations.

But is it right for your needs? Consider these three questions:

1. How much leachate do you produce and how contaminated is it?
2. What are you doing with your leachate now?
3. Do you want to reuse or dispose your water?

How much leachate do you produce and how contaminated is it?

The quantity and quality of your leachate impacts the Atmos Leachate Treatment System’s efficacy at your landfill. Let’s look closer at each of these factors.

The amount of leachate you produce

In a 24-hour period, the ALTS processes up to 70,000 gallons of leachate.

To treat quantities outside that range (either less than 15,000 to 20,000 gallons, or more than 70,000), you may need to adjust the system.

Thanks to the ALTS’ modular design, customizing the combination of technologies to meet your landfill’s needs is simple. Whether you only need to combat certain contaminants, require more modules to increase capacity or need less support to accommodate fewer gallons, we build the system to your specifications.

But how much leachate the ALTS cleans also depends on how dirty your leachate is to begin with.

Your contaminant load

If you’re interested in the ALTS, one of the first steps is sending us your raw leachate data. Once we understand your contaminant load and your goals, we can start designing a system that’s right for your landfill.

But don’t worry, we designed the ALTS to handle the worst of the worst. Here’s an example of the typical results you might see with the treatment system in place.

If you only need to reduce the amount of ammonia in your leachate, consider bioaugmentation. This natural, cost-effective fix uses microorganisms to lower ammonia nitrate levels until they’re within the acceptable range for a POTW or other treatment method.

What are you doing with your leachate now? Is it actually working for your landfill’s sustainability goals?

Trucking leachate to the nearest POTW tops the list of the most common leachate management methods, but other strategies exist. And in certain circumstances, sticking with those solutions could make more sense for your landfill.

Ponds and other evaporators

Another common management method is to dig a large pond to collect the leachate for eventual evaporation. This process takes time and often depends on the weather. For example, a rainy season could slow evaporation down even further. Similarly, evaporators atomize the leachate, speeding up the natural evaporation that happens in ponds.

Landfills often run into capacity issues with both of these methods.

Reverse osmosis on its own

The ALTS’ third and final module uses reverse osmosis to filter out the finest contaminants, like PFOS and PFAS. And while R/O excels at removing those, it handles larger contaminants poorly. These larger contaminants, such as dissolved solids, tend to clog the expensive R/O membranes, resulting in slower volumes and more frequent R/O membrane replacements.

Much like ponds and other evaporators, reverse osmosis-only solutions can have a much smaller capacity than the Atmos Leachate Treatment System.

On-site wastewater treatment plants

By building the equivalent of your own POTW at your landfill, you could process your own leachate without having to worry about trucking and other additional fees. However, facilities like this take years and at least $4-5 million in CapEx to build. For smaller landfills, it’s just not an option, even if it would reduce costs long term.

In contrast, the ALTS requires no capital expenditure, and we can design, build and install it in 12 weeks, which makes it an effective solution for landfills of any size.

Bioreactor or anaerobic digestors

As the most expensive option, any kind of microbial-based solution becomes a massive undertaking that requires a high quantity of leachate and a lot of open space. But it also results in the lowest treatment cost. If your landfill has a solution like this in place, you likely don’t need an additional leachate management system.

Direct access to a POTW

Finally, while rare and becoming rarer, some landfills have standing agreements with their local POTWs to pipe leachate directly to the facility.

If your landfill lucked out with a sweetheart deal like this — or operates near enough to a POTW to have minimal transportation costs — this is the more cost-effective solution. After all, if a treatment facility accepts your raw leachate as is, what’s the point in cleaning it?

But arrangements like this are vanishing. Just because this option exists, doesn’t mean it will six months to a year down the road as POTWs increase their prices and discontinue service for landfills with high contaminant loads.

For example, a landfill in the Pacific Northwest recently found itself in this exact situation — suddenly cut off. Not only had its heavily contaminated leachate pushed the POTW beyond the limits of its permit, but the leachate had also started killing the facility’s bacteria. Stuck, they turned to the ALTS and found a new solution for their leachate.

If you use any of these solutions, ask yourself these questions

Are you keeping up with leachate production?

Are you getting your intended results?

If you answered no to either, a two-pronged approach — or a new method entirely — may be right for your operations. We’ve implemented the ALTS as a full-scale solution in some cases, but also as a supplementary strategy when necessary.

It may feel like an expensive, redundant hassle to add another leachate management system if you already have a capital-intense one in place. But if you aren’t seeing the results you need, you may need another option.

Do you want to reuse or dispose your water

How clean you need your leachate to be depends on what you want to do with the water.

After the Atmos Leachate Treatment System filters your leachate’s contaminants out, you have many sustainable options for what you do with the water, including:

• Dust control
• Atmos Cover ADC
• Washing trucks
• Direct land application
• Direct discharge

Your goals impact which permits you need from the EPA or your county. Our team of experts can guide you through this process and design your ALTS to meet the necessary requirements.

For example, NDPES permits for direct discharge into U.S. waters come with a plethora of red tape, but permits for direct land application for uses that stay on site (such as for crop irrigation) aren’t as strictly controlled.

Take control of your leachate management

\You need a powerful, versatile strategy to clean your leachate. If you think the Atmos Leachate Treatment System could be right for your landfill, get in touch with our team. We’ll discuss your leachate, your goals and how we can help you reach them.